


Gemini

by Mornelithe_falconsbane



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Like mild salsa, Mild Horror, POV Second Person, Timeskip, canon AU, you just kind of taste the lingering fear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-02 09:36:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21159515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mornelithe_falconsbane/pseuds/Mornelithe_falconsbane
Summary: It’s spring when you disappear.





	Gemini

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NetchSlayer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NetchSlayer/gifts).

> Happy Halloween!

You walk straight into hell with your eyes open but blind.

Someone taught you to trust your elders. That was a mistake. The lesson has been learned.

You bleed for the strength he promised you, but somehow you’re always a little weaker than everyone else, a little softer and smaller. A lot more useless.

It’s okay, you’ll catch up, you think--you pray, really, because you’re starting to get nervous. You’re still on the fringe of every team you’re on, you’re still the weakest link. You’re stronger but it’s not enough. 

You get released from training when it’s spring again. You’re happy for about a minute before you’re attacked by the thought that the reason you’ve been allowed to leave isn’t because you’re good enough. Maybe just the opposite. You were never anything special.

They tell you that you can leave, that you’re allowed to go outside for an hour--a reward. For what, you don’t know. They aren’t happy with you. Outside, the trees have the palest yellow green leaves, and the pink of fallen cherry blossoms coats the streets. You missed them by only a few days. Fucking figures, doesn't it.

You wander around a town you don’t know anymore, not recognizing anyone you see. When the sun threatens to rise you go home, your chest aching but your face perfectly, utterly blank. 

It takes a week with your rations get cut down to almost nothing (because you aren’t being trained and you don’t need food if you’re not useful. There's some kind of flaw in this logic, but you don't try to point it out) before you finally get a mission. You’ll join a merchant caravan heading to Wind Country as an orphan going to live with your aunt. Once you get there, you’ll steal the merchant’s stamp for a few minutes, use it to sign a slightly different contract than their original copy, and make the old version disappear.

It sounds almost exciting. 

First, though, you need new clothes. Your old dress fits so loose that it looks like it belongs to a different girl. It’s also too short, because somehow you grew an inch or four. How long has it been since you wore it? It’s so...fragile. Pointless. The fabric catches on your calluses and rasps loud enough for a target to hear. You set it aside. 

_ It might be a good cleaning cloth for kunai, _ you think and the thought makes you angry, makes you want to grab it back and wear it regardless. You kill the angry, wielding apathy with studied mastery. Anger only get you pain.

You want something black, they hand you a sweater in a shade of grey that’ll look awful with your skintone, three sizes too big to hide the places where your bones jut out. You hate it, but there’s no point in protesting.

Your hair is black now, and you have to keep your hands inside your sleeves. They can’t pass for harmless anymore, the knuckles so scarred and scabbed that sometimes they look like meat to you.

The Mask tilts their head critically and tells you that you’ll barely pass for civilian. Somehow. In spite of yourself. You came in too old, you nearly failed training so many times that it’s a miracle that you’re alive. Civilian and weakness is tattooed into your blood. 

There’s a cold and tired seed of pride, the quiet flutter of joy that at least you _ almost _ look strong. You’re tired to the bone and hungry all the damn time, but at least--

You see a mirror later. You don’t look like any kind of ninja, you just look like bad news. You meet your own eyes with a jolt of recognition that leaves your stomach feeling strange. You hurry away. There’s a mission--there’s no one but you in the mirror. I think you saw me.

The sunlight feels like punishment after so many months in the dark. You keep looking up at the trees, and the team you left slithers around the edge of your mind.

There’s Konoha ninja without masks guarding the caravan. You avoid them, but you feel their eyes on you. You weren’t supposed to attract notice, but they keep looking over at you. The bruises are hidden, there’s nothing weird about you-- 

One corners you, a plain-faced boy only a few years older. In a voice so soft you strain to hear it, he offers to heal you. You stare at him, and you don’t know what you’re supposed to do with a choice. Is it disloyal to say yes? Is it endangering the mission to say no?

He frowns, sunlight casting streaks of gold across his face, and he bows, shallow but weird because--that’s not--he’s stronger than you. “If you change your mind, just ask.”

You nod, your eyes burning in the sunlight.

That night, white masks descend from the trees like fat orb weavers descending from their webs. You don’t react as they converge around the chuunin keeping watch. They trained you to be a mirror reflecting nothing and that, at least, you didn’t fail at. 

The chuunin doesn’t see them and it’s like they aren’t real, like they’re just your nightmares skulking in the dark. The Masks make sure you’re watching when they poison him, using a pale silver dust that’ll make him dizzy and thin his blood so much that he’ll bleed out from a scratch. He’s safe as long as he doesn’t bleed, but you know it won’t be long.

You nod sharply as the Masks creep back into the tree, acknowledging their actions. It’s your fault for attracting notice. 

You feel like something is tearing inside you, like you’re trying to escape through your skin. You know that everything about this is wrong, and it makes you crumble a bit. It wasn’t an important mission, not if they sent you on it. Surely destroying Konoha’s resources must be reserved for something more important than--

The chuunin stirs, and you pretend to be asleep.

He doesn’t die for three whole days, and you wonder if you were mistaken about the poison. Some things are genjutsu. You’re good at dispelling them, but you can still be fooled. 

At the border, you see the bruises. His wrist is swollen black with them. You look away before you get caught staring, sick down to the pit of your stomach. He’s going to die after all. You don’t dare warn him, not with the Masks watching. Instead you focus on being invisible, sliding between people’s perception. Other people knowing you exist is dangerous. You know that now. 

Perfect chakra control. Nearly useless, they told you. You don’t disagree, but in the plains between Fire and Wind you pretend to be asleep as you mouth the words _ blood poison _ behind your blanket until you’ve memorized the way your tongue shapes the air. 

The chuunin looks at you again when he goes off shift, heading back toward his team, and you swallow down a scream. You wait for him to move away, wait until he’s as far from you as he’ll get. Then you shape the words with your mouth, mirroring it in the air by his ear. A breeze gives your chakra breath, and his chakra flickers.

He heard. You don’t remember that. But he heard. He was a medic, so maybe he made it. It’d be nice if someone escaped this spiderweb. Or maybe he was just another mask, there to test you.

They grabbed you that night. The mission was a test, and you’d failed it.

You crack a little deeper on the way back. They use genjutsu on you until you don’t know which way is up, until you think you’d slit that chuunin’s throat yourself, but it’s not true.

Trust in this, if nothing else. He was alive last you saw him. You never killed that chuunin. I might have, but shhh, that's our little secret.

***

They lock you in the dark like it’s a punishment. Small mercies.

The cell is too small for an adult, but your hands touch both sides if you stretch. There’s nothing in it but a piss bucket, so it’s a lot like the bunks, just quieter and more private. It’s kind of funny that the punishment is better than training. 

You sleep for hours at first, your mind still raw and not quite fitting into the same spaces it always had. The Masks had tried to break you with their genjutsu. It feels like I'm breathing with lungs I don't have. Strange. I think I like it.

What they’d lacked imagination, they had made up for in brute force. You're so tired that your thoughts are echoing.

When you wake up, it’s quiet. You don’t think about the mission, you don’t think about the chuunin who you maybe killed, maybe didn’t kill, maybe got killed. You just close your eyes and sleep some more.

When you wake a second time, you explore the cell with your hands and figure out that it’s a box, not a cell. The sides are wood except a narrow ventilation opening on both sides. The bottom is wood slats, the top metal bars that are set so low that you can’t stand upright. The door at the front is solid wood, and sometimes you see flickers of light around the edges of it.

If it wouldn’t get you in more trouble, you probably could break out by punching out the slats at the bottom, or kicking through the walls. You don’t want to. _"It's a good idea,"_ I whisper.

You pause, your head tilting. _DidyouhearmeSakura._

They probably think the box is a terrible punishment, so you try to look chastised. There’s a few Hyuuga in the Masks, you think. 

This is the safest you’ve felt in months. You’re hungry, but you won’t be weak with it for at least another few days, and until then it’s quiet and dark.

It feels like unfurling, the tension in your body ebbing as you nap on your stomach, head pillowed on your arms. My hand slips out, passing through your ribs and the slatted floor below. The emptiness below feels cool, like I have skin--like I'm real.

You play with your chakra when you can’t sleep anymore, drawing flowers and birds in the darkness with threads of pale green. The flowers should be pink, you think, which takes you another hour of experimenting. The box feels private, feels secluded, and your mind is a hundred scattered puzzle pieces. I'm just the biggest one, short of you. The piece of you that's falling out of your skin, touching the glowing chakra with hands that feel real, making cherry blossoms glow like the sun when I touch them--why can't you feel this, Sakura?

They broke you to the rules, taught you to do nothing without being told, but you forget that for now. Is it because I whispered so sweetly and asked you to? I fucking wish.

You smile. I smile too.

***

It doesn’t take long for you to get bored of drawing with chakra. Naruto’s clones always fascinated you me. And given free time and nothing else to do...

You start with academy bunshin. Your chakra hangs from the iron bars above like the fairy lights from your old life, pulsing in time with your heartbeat as you weave yourself out of illusions.

The face is thinner, and that doesn’t look as good on you as you always thought it would. Your hair--black doesn’t suit you, you decide, and you’re right. Only your eyes are familiar.

Your fingers pass through yourself, your chakra feathersoft on your bruises. The clone blinks, breathes, and smiles back at you, but that’s not good enough--you made her do those things. Naruto’s clones had been independent. Too independent, sometimes.

You pour your chakra into the clone recklessly, weaving it into a mimicry of the chakra you can feel inside yourself. Coils, veins, tendrils, a fragile skeleton of a person, each thread of yourself laid out with a hope and a memory. A shadow clone--you’re not much, but you’re a friendly face, aren’t you?__

All you want is a little company.

I breathe in, you breathe out. I can _feel_ the air in my lungs, raw and new and the same air I've been breathing my whole life.

“Hi Sakura,” I say. 

And I grin. Have you ever thought that maybe ROOT is fucking bullshit, Sakura?

...of course you have. We're of one mind, aren't we?

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed it, please consider rereading while highlighting the text.


End file.
